Polychrome Perplexities: The Painted Rock Art of the Southern Black Hills

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Infrared, ultraviolet, and D-Stretch imaging has provided a more complete view of a complex set of black and red painted rock from the southern Black Hills of South Dakota. The painted designs include bison, bears, other quadrupeds, humans, net-, web-, and gridlike figures, atlatl darts, hand- and footprints, mythological beings, and nonrepresentational figures. Most individual figures are either red or black, but some are dichromatic. Neither color is consistently superimposed over the other; rather, they appear to be part of a single tradition. Based on superimpositions and subject matter this rock art is hypothesized to date to the Late Archaic period, approximately 2500 to 1000 years before present. It shows some affiliation with Eastern Woodlands cultures; however, no specific links were found between the pictures and oral literatures.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Role of Rock Art in Cultural Understanding: A Symposium in Honor of Polly Schaafsma   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23028